Trends in M&A Deal Terms

For the past several years Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) has been publishing aggregate data on trends in M&A. These aren’t just high level observations, but rather are nitty gritty, details around the some of the most important terms contained in purchase agreements. As a self proclaimed M&A geek, I live for this stuff. And if information is power, this study dishes out plenty. And as a result helps level the playing field for companies (who transact very infrequently), their investors (who transact a bit more often) and buyers (who often have dedicated M&A practices who do nothing but execute transactions).

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a number of Foundry related transactions in the past year. Knowing market trends (and in some cases – and here’s where your VC may really be able to help you – knowing details of a specific buyer’s historic willingness to negotiate around certain terms) is extraordinarily valuable.

You’ll find the full SRS report here. There’s a brief statement about their methodology at the beginning that’s worth taking a quick perusal through before you dig in (the data are based on the 196 transactions on which SRS acted as representative).

A couple of trends that stood out to me:

– 86% of all transactions were all cash. With a favorable borrowing environment and many companies holding on to large cash reserves an increasing number of deals are all cash.
– 24% of transactions contained an earn-out. I’m generally not a fan of earn-outs and the continued relatively frequent use of them is a little surprising to me (this figure was 25% last year).
– Average Escrow period was 15 months. The detail here is pretty interesting. The most common escrow period was 18 months (44% of deals), and 12 months was the 2nd most common period (24% of deals).
– Escrow size averaged just under 13%. This is always a hotly debated issue in transactions. Interestingly the median escrow size was over a point lower at 11.7%. There’s a chart below showing the distribution of escrow size.

One item that wasn’t covered in the study but which I think would be interesting is to see the % of transactions where there is a buyer initiated management incentive plan of size (say above 10% of the total consideration). We’re seeing more and more buyers use this tactic to either incent management (nice view) or separate management from their investors (the not nice view). Either way, they can be significant and I’d love to see how common they are and what percentage of deal proceeds are set aside for this purpose.